War Room in Churchill War Museum

A couple of months ago, I visited London during the Royal Wedding week (yeah, I know, we didn’t mention it in the least at the time, did we?) Since I got back I have been horribly remiss on writing about everything I did because I moved to a new city and took on two new jobs in the weeks surrounding the trip. But I can’t let the opportunity pass to talk about one of the things that made it so much easier to cram in a million sights in a short few days – The London Pass.

My pass, arrived at my home weeks before I left along with a book full of companion information that was as good as any of the travel books I took with me. It gave me a ton of time to plan, which I also did during the trip to Heathrow and around London with the help of their iPhone app on my iPod (which I used with my Fonmigo whilst going from stop to stop, the subject of another post.)

Of course, any attempt to plan is kinda laughed at by the universe and a lot of the great London Pass sites I had planned to visit ended up being missed. But the beauty of the pass is that nothing is really pre-scheduled and I could go anywhere as long as I went within the date I started using the pass. So instead of my grand plans to go to the Tate museums, I was able to go with the flow and follow up a wonderfully speedy tour of Westminster Abbey (trust me, the pass pays for itself in avoiding that queue) with a visit to the Household Calvary Museum and the Churchill War Museum, which may have been the best historical museum I’ve ever been to (and trust me, I’ve been to all of the Smithsonians in Washington DC.)

View From the Thames River Boat Cruise

The most fun thing that I did on my London Pass was the Thames River Boat Cruise. That was the one thing that had been recommended by pretty much everyone who has ever visited London to me, and I managed to squeeze it into my last day in London, accompanied by a visit to the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower Bridge and a double-decker bus ride across central London. Talk about a way to see EVERYTHING! And yes, going on the Thames and seeing the skyline was pretty much everything I had imagined from years of seeing Richard Curtis romantic comedies. Except thankfully less rainy that day.

The one thing that I recommend is definitely getting more than a couple of days of the pass because, as I said, I ended up missing out on a lot. When I go back eventually, I will definitely be booking more days so I can go to the Globe Theater, Windsor Castle, the Wimbledon Tour Experience, and all of the walking tours that I wimped out on this go around.